Bishops are not the only clueless ones. The National Post has this story about the Scouts:

Richard (Rick) Turley, 58, who was involved with Scouts in California and in Victoria through the 1970s and ‘80s and who spent years preying on victims in Victoria and other Vancouver Island communities.

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In the 1980s, when Turley started volunteering with the 2nd Douglas Scout Group in Victoria, which met at Craigflower elementary school and included boys from the Gorge, View Royal, Burnside and Tillicum areas, had already had been convicted in the U.S. of kidnapping a boy he met through Scouts and served time in a state hospital as a “mentally disordered sex offender.”

Jean Buydens, 2nd Douglas group committee chairwoman during the 1980s, said in an interview that she was uncomfortable with Turley from the moment he arrived, but parents loved him.

“The mothers thought he was a wonderful leader. He would take the boys away camping at the weekends and he would have them over to his house. They thought he was a wonderfully involved Scout leader,” she said.

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One boy had gone to Turley’s house to cut the grass “and when his mother picked him up he was white and shaking and said ‘I am never going there again,’” Buydens said.

There were frequent, and sometimes unauthorized, camping trips and a Beaver leader, who unexpectedly dropped by Turley’s house, saw boys with beer bottles, she said.

Turley also brought boys into the Scout group from outside the area, including under-age boys, Buydens said.

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It was decided Turley should be removed from 2nd Douglas, but he was allowed to volunteer with Cordova Sea Scouts under the supervision of another leader, who had been warned he was never to be alone with the boys, Buydens said.

Police were not told because there was not enough proof, she said.

“I was shocked they would give him another chance, but they explained they had no grounds to stop it. It was just hearsay,” Buydens said.

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Turley was sentenced to seven years in 1996 for convictions on five separate counts of sexual assaults on four young boys, including a case where he committed buggery on one child between 1971 and 1973, court documents show.

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But the Boy Scouts were only a small part of his pattern of abuse, according to Ruth Picha, the Crown prosecutor working the case. Turley was involved in several community organizations, including Little League baseball, and more than once assaulted children of the mothers he was dating, she explained. He was willing to do anything to get him near children.

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